Tears rose in Suzanna, seeing her grandmother tucked up like a child, except that she was sleeping not in preparation for a new day but for endless night. She had been so fierce, this woman, and so resolute. Now all that strength had gone, and forever.
‘Shall I leave you alone awhile?’ said the nurse, and without waiting for a reply, withdrew. Suzanna put her hand to her brow to keep the tears at bay.
When she looked again, the old woman’s blue-veined lids were flickering open.
For a moment it seemed Mimi’s eyes had focused somewhere beyond Suzanna. Then the gaze sharpened, and the look that found Suzanna was as compelling as she had remembered it.
Mimi opened her mouth. Her lips were fever-dried. She passed her tongue across them to little effect. Utterly unnerved, Suzanna approached the bedside.
‘Hello,’ she said softly. ‘It’s me. It’s Suzanna.’
The old woman’s eyes locked with Suzanna’s. I know who you are, the stare said.
‘Would you like some water?’
A tiny frown nicked Mimi’s brow.
‘Water?’ Suzanna repeated, and again, the tiniest of frowns by way of reply. They understood each other.
Suzanna poured an inch of water from the plastic jug on the bedside table into a plastic glass, and took the glass to Mimi’s lips. As she did so the old woman lifted her hand a fraction from the crisp sheet and brushed Suzanna’s arm. The touch was feather-light, but it sent such a jolt through Suzanna that she almost dropped the glass.
Mimi’s breath had suddenly become uneven, and there were tics and twitches around her eyes and mouth as she struggled to shape a word. Her eyes blazed with frustration, but the most she could produce was a grunt in her throat.
‘It’s all right,’ said Suzanna.
The look on the parchment face refused such platitudes. No. the eyes said, it isn’t all right, it’s very far from all right. Death is waiting at the door, and I can’t even speak the feelings I have.
‘What is it?’ Suzanna whispered, bending closer to the pillow. The old woman’s fingers still trembled against her arm. Her skin tingled at the contact, her stomach churned. ‘How can I help you?’ she said. It was the vaguest of questions, but she was shooting in the dark.
Mimi’s eyes flickered closed for an instant, and the frown deepened. She had given up trying to make words, apparently. Perhaps she had given up entirely.
And then, with a suddenness that made Suzanna cry out, the fingers that rested on her arm slid around her wrist. The grip lightened ‘til it hurt. She might have pulled herself free, but she had no time. A subtle marriage of scents was filling her head; dust and tissue-paper and lavender. The tall-boy of course; it was the perfume from the tall-boy. And with that recognition, another certainty: that Mimi was somehow reaching into Suzanna’s head and putting the perfume there.
There was an instant of panic – the animal in her responding to this defeat of her mind’s autonomy. Then the panic broke before a vision.
Of what, she wasn’t certain. A pattern of some kind, a design which melted and reconfigured itself over and over again. Perhaps there was colour in the design, but it was so subtle she could not be certain; subtle too, the shapes evolving in the kaleidoscope.
This, like the perfume, was Mimi’s doing. Though reason protested. Suzanna couldn’t doubt the truth of that. This image was somehow of vital significance to the old lady. That was why she was using the last drops of her will’s resources to have Suzanna share the sight in her mind’s eye.
But she had no chance to investigate the vision.
Behind her, the nurse said:
‘Oh my god.’
The voice broke Mimi’s spell, and the patterns burst into a storm of petals, disappearing. Suzanna was left staring down at Mimi’s face, their gazes momentarily locking before the old woman lost all control of her wracked body. The hand dropped from Suzanna’s wrist, the eyes began to rove back and forth grotesquely; dark spittle ran from the side of her mouth.
‘You’d better wait outside.’ the nurse said, crossing to press the call button beside the bed.
Suzanna backed off towards the door, distressed by the choking sounds her grandmother was making. A second nurse had appeared.
‘Call Doctor Chai,’ the first said. Then, to Suzanna, ‘Please. will you wait outside?’
She did as she was told: there was nothing she could do inside but hamper the experts. The corridor was busy; she had to walk twenty yards from the door of Mimi’s room before she found somewhere she could take hold of herself.
Her thoughts were like blind runners; they rushed back and forth wildly, but went nowhere. Time and again, she found memory taking her to Mimi’s bedroom in Rue Street, the tall-boy looming before her like some reproachful ghost. What had Gran’ma wanted to tell her, with the scent of lavender?; and how had she managed the extraordinary feat of passing thoughts between them? Was it something she’d always been capable of? If so, what other powers did she own?
‘Are you Suzanna Parrish?’
Here at least was a question she could answer.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m Doctor Chai.’
The face before her was round as a biscuit, and as bland.
‘Your grandmother, Mrs Laschenski …’
‘Yes?’
‘… there’s been a serious deterioration in her condition. Are you her only relative?’
The only one in this country. My mother and father are dead. She has a son. In Canada.’
‘Do you have any way of contacting him?’
‘I don’t have his telephone number with me … but I could get it.’
‘I think he should be informed,’ said Chai.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Suzanna. ‘What should I…? I mean, can you tell me how long she’s going to live?’
The Doctor sighed. ‘Anybody’s guess,’ he said. ‘When she came in I didn’t think she’d last the night. But she did. And the next. And the next. She’s just kept holding on. Her tenacity’s really remarkable.’ He halted, looking straight at Suzanna. ‘My belief is, she was waiting for you.’
‘For me?’
‘I think so. Your name’s the only coherent word she’s spoken since she’s been here. I don’t think she was going to let go until you’d come.’
‘I see,’ said Suzanna.
‘You must be very important to her,’ he replied. ‘It’s good you’ve seen her. So many of the old folks, you know, die in here and nobody ever seems to care. Where are you staying?’
‘I hadn’t thought. A hotel. I suppose.’
‘Perhaps you’d give us a number to contact you at, should the necessity arise.’
‘Of course.’
So saying, he nodded and left her to the runners. They were no less blind for the conversation.
Mimi Laschenski did not love her, as the Doctor had claimed; how could she? She knew nothing of the way her grandchild had grown up; they were like closed books to each other. And yet something in what Chai had said rang true. Perhaps she had been waiting, fighting the good fight until her daughter’s daughter came to her bedside.
And why? To hold her hand and expend her last ounce of energy giving Suzanna a fragment of some tapestry? It was a pretty gift, but it signified either too much or too little. Whichever, Suzanna did not comprehend it.
She went back to Room Five. The nurse was in attendance, the old lady still as stone on her pillow. Eyes closed, hands laid by her side. Suzanna stared down at the face, slack once more. It could tell her nothing.
She took hold of Mimi’s hand and held it for a few moments, tight, then went on her way. She would go back to Rue Street, she decided, and see if being in the house jogged a memory or two.
She’d spent so much time forgetting her childhood, putting it where it couldn’t call the bluff of hard-won maturity. And now, with the boxes sealed, what did she find? A mystery that defied her adult self, and coaxed her back into the past in search of a solution.
&nb
sp; She remembered the face in the tall-boy mirror, that had sent her sobbing down the stairs.
Was it waiting still? And was it still her own?
VI
MAD MOONEY
1
al was frightened as he had never been frightened in his life before. He sat in his room, the door locked, and shook.
The shaking had begun a few minutes after events at Rue Street, almost twenty-four hours ago now, and it hadn’t shown much sign of stopping since. Sometimes it made his hands tremble so much he could hardly hold the glass of whisky he’d nursed through an all but sleepless night, other times it made his teeth chatter. But most of the shaking didn’t go on outside, it was in. It was as if the pigeons had got into his belly somehow, and were flapping their wings against his innards.
And all because he’d seen something wonderful, and he knew in his bones that his life would never be the same again. How could it? He’d climbed the sky and looked down on the secret place that he’d been waiting since childhood to find.
He’d always been a solitary child, as much through choice as circumstance, happiest when he could unshackle his imagination and let it wander. It took little to get such journeys started. Looking back, it seemed he’d spent half his school days gazing out of the window, transported by a line of poetry whose meaning he couldn’t quite unearth, or the sound of someone singing in a distant classroom, into a world more pungent and more remote than the one he knew. A world whose scents were carried to his nostrils by winds mysteriously warm in a chill December; whose creatures paid him homage on certain nights at the foot of his bed, and whose peoples he conspired with in sleep.
But despite the familiarity of this place, the comfort he felt there, its precise nature and location remained elusive, and though he’d read every book he could find that promised some rare territory, he always came away disappointed. They were too perfect, those childhood kingdoms; all honey and summer.
The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking.
That was why he trembled now, for that was how he felt. Like a man whose head was about to split.
2
He’d woken early, gone downstairs and cooked himself a fried egg and bacon sandwich, then sat with the ruins of his gluttony until he heard his father stirring above. He quickly called the firm, and told Wilcox that he was sick, and wouldn’t be in work today. He told the same to Brendan – who was about his morning ablutions and, with the door locked, couldn’t see the ashen, anxious face his son was wearing this morning. Then, these duties done, he went back to his room and sat on his bed to examine the events at Rue Street afresh, hoping that the nature of yesterday’s mysteries could eventually be made to come clear.
It did little good. Whichever way he turned events they seemed impervious to rational explanation, and he was left only with the same razor-sharp memory of the experience and the ache of longing that came with it.
Everything he’d ever wanted had been in that land; he knew it. Everything his education had taught him to disbelieve – all miracles, all mystery, all blue shadow and sweet-breathed spirits. All the pigeon knew, all the wind knew, all the human world had once grasped and now forgotten, all of it was wailing in that place. He’d seen it with his own eyes.
Which probably made him insane.
How else could he explain an hallucination of such precision and complexity? No, he was insane. And why not? He had lunacy in his blood. His father’s father, Mad Mooney, ended his life crazy as a coot. The man had been a poet, according to Brendan, though tales of his life and times had been forbidden in Chariot Street. Hush your nonsense, Eileen had always said, whenever Brendan mentioned the man, though whether this taboo was against Poetry, Delirium or the Irish Cal had never decided. Whichever, it was an edict his father had often broken when his wife’s back was turned, for Brendan was fond of Mad Mooney and his verses. Cal had even learned a few, at his father’s knee. And now here he was, carrying on that family tradition: seeing visions and crying into his whisky.
The question was: to tell or not to tell. To speak what he’d seen, and endure the laughter and the sly looks, or to keep it hidden. Part of him badly wanted to talk, to spill everything to somebody (Brendan, even) and see what they made of it. But another part said: be quiet, be careful. Wonderland doesn’t come to those who blab about it, only to those who keep their silence, and wail.
So that’s what he did. He sat, and shook, and waited.
3
Wonderland didn’t turn up, but Geraldine did, and she was in no mood for lunatics. Cal heard her voice in the hall below; heard Brendan telling her that Cal was ill, and didn’t want to be disturbed, heard her tell Brendan that she intended to see Cal whether he was sick or not; then she was at the door.
‘Cal?’
She tried the handle, found the door locked and rapped on it. ‘Cal? It’s me. Wake up.’
He feigned bleariness, aided by a tongue now well whisky-sodden.
‘Who is it?’ he said.
‘Why’s the door locked? It’s me. Geraldine.’
‘I’m not feeling too good.’
‘Let me in, Cal.’
He knew better than to argue with her in such a mood. He shambled to the door, and turned the key.
‘You look terrible,’ she said, her voice mellowing as soon as she set eyes on him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I’m all right,’ he protested. ‘Really. I just had a fall.’
‘Why didn’t you ring me? I was expecting you at the wedding rehearsal last night. Had you forgotten?’
The following Saturday Geraldine’s elder sister Teresa was to marry the love of her life, a good Catholic boy whose fertility could scarcely be in question: his beloved was four months pregnant. Her swelling belly was not being allowed to overshadow proceedings however: the wedding was to be a grand affair. Cal, who’d been courting Geraldine for two years, was a valued guest, given the general expectation that he’d be the next to exchange vows with one of Norman Kellaway’s four daughters. Doubtless his missing the rehearsal had been viewed as minor heresy.
‘I did remind you, Cal,’ Geraldine said. ‘You know how important it is to me.’
‘I had a bit of trouble,’ he told her. ‘I fell off a wall.’
She looked incredulous.
‘What were you doing climbing on a wall?’ she said, as though at his age he should be well beyond such indignities.
He told her briefly about the escape of 33, and the chase to Rue Street. It was a bowdlerized account, of course. In it there was no mention of the carpet or what he’d seen there.
‘Did you find the bird?’ she asked, when he’d finished recounting the chase.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ he told her. In fact, he’d come home to Chariot Street, only to be told by Brendan that 33 had flown back to the loft in the late afternoon, and was now back beside his speckled wife. This he told Geraldine.
‘So you missed the rehearsal looking for a pigeon that came home anyway?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘But you know how Dad loves his birds,’ he said.
Mention of Brendan softened Geraldine further still; she and Cal’s father had been fast friends since Cal had first introduced them. ‘She sparkles,’ his father had told Cal, ‘hold on to her, ‘cause if you don’t, somebody else will.’ Eileen had never been so certain. She’d always been cool with Geraldine, a fact which had only made Brendan’s praise more lavish.
The smile she offered now was gently indulgent. Though Cal had been loath to let her in and have her spoil his reverie, he was suddenly grateful for her company. He even felt the shaking fade a little.
‘It’s stale in here,’ she said. ‘You need some fresh air. Why don’t you open the window?’
He did as she suggested. When he turned round she was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her back to the collage of pictures he’d
put up there in his youth, and which his parents had never removed. The Wailing Wall, Geraldine called it; it had always upset her, with its parade of movie stars and mushroom clouds, politicians and pigs.
‘The dress is beautiful,’ she said.
He puzzled over the remark a moment, his mind sluggish.
‘Teresa’s dress,’ she prompted.
‘Oh.’
‘Come and sit down, Cal.’
He lingered by the window. The air was balmy, and clean. It reminded him –
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
The words were on the tip of his tongue. ‘I saw Wonderland.’ he wanted to say. That was it, in sum. The rest – the circumstances, the description – those details were niceties. The three essential words were easy enough, weren’t they? I saw Wonderland. And if there was anybody in his life to whom he should say them, it was this woman.
‘Tell me, Cal,’ she said. ‘Are you ill?’
He shook his head.
‘I saw …’ he began.
She looked at him with plain puzzlement.
‘What?’ she said. ‘What did you see?’
‘I saw …’ he began again, and again faltered. His tongue refused the instruction he gave it; the words simply wouldn’t come. He looked away from her face at the Wailing Wall. The pictures …’ he said finally, ‘… they’re an eyesore.’
A strange euphoria swept over him as he sailed so close to telling, then away. The part of him that wanted what he’d seen kept secret had in that moment won the battle, and perhaps even the war. He could not tell her. Not now, not ever. It was a great relief to have made up his mind.
I’m Mad Mooney, he thought to himself. It wasn’t such a bad idea at that.
‘You’re looking better already,’ she said. ‘It must be the fresh air.’
4
And what lessons could he learn from the mad poet, now that they were fellow spirits? What would Mad Mooney do, were he in Cal’s shoes?